The Security Mentor

Advice for normal people about computer and information security from Beryllium Sphere(R) LLC

Monday, November 24, 2008

Voting machines roundup

Here are some more university studies of voting machine security. The key quote, more important than the fact that they demonstrated a virus copying itself from one voting machine to another and therefore making it possible to compromise several machines by infecting just one, is

While most critical systems are continuously scrutinized and evaluated for safety and correctness, electronic voting systems are not subject to the same level of scrutiny. A number of recent studies have shown that most (if not all) of the electronic voting systems being used today are fatally flawed, and that their quality does not match the importance of the task that they are supposed to carry out.

Touch screen machines lost ground in this election, especially in the swing states of Ohio and Florida. They were still being used in West Virginia: people in multiple counties there reported their votes being flipped from the candidate they picked to the other one, but that's more likely to be the result of an out-of-alignment touch screen than anything else.